Delusions of Eloquence

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Douglas Klump: The perimeters of our assignment were described to us with specificity, Mr. Shlubb. We are to deposit our cargo into the body of water which we now overlook. It was likeways made clear to us that any embellishments of said perimeters would not be advisory. Burt Shlubb: I cannot prescribe to such a narrow interpretation of the perimeters which you now invoke, Mr. Klump.

Delusions of Eloquence occur when a person tries too hard to sound "educated" by using Big Words or carefully chosen phrases but gets it wrong, filling their dialogue with malapropisms, mispronunciations and mangled grammar. The result is that they sound less educated and at the same time a pompous and pretentious attention seeker.

In fiction this habit can be used to set up a character as a stuffed shirt who demands respect but is mocked behind his back, or to add charm or humor to a character who would otherwise seem a little flat. Unfortunately it is sometimes a case of Truth in Television as there really are people who do this.

Note, this trope works better in print. Characters with Delusions of Eloquence are really funny in the comics, where you can look at the talk bubbles and see, in black and white, what they are doing to our mother tongue. In a film, they just come across as two mooks who talk too much. ("Low-rent thugs with delusions of eloquence," as Hartigan puts it).

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Ranma ˝: Tatewaki Kunō. "The vengeance of heaven is slow but sure...". One of his least head-aching speeches.

Comic Books

Sin City has the former (and, in a roundabout way, current) trope namers Shlubb and Klump. What can you say about people who render "circumnavigation" as "circumlocution" (when talking about driving around the block, yet!) or "quenched" as "quelched" or refer to "Consequences most dire" being "athwart us" or... you get the picture.

Runabout from Transformers is a good example. He and his best friend/partner-in-crime Runamuck are basically delinquents who love pranks and graffiti. The difference is that while Runamuck is fully aware that what the duo are doing is childish and silly (and gladly embraces this fact), Runabout has deluded himself into believing that he's a brilliant, Banksy-style artist who creates revolutionary art and social commentary. His art is actually poorly scribbled phrases like "humans are wimps".

Fan Works

Goku in Dragon Ball Z Abridged has a tendency to use words and phrases he doesn't actually understand. This can range from funny to awkward.

Films — Live-Action

In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the head weasel talks like this. Saying things like "Do you want us to disresemble the place?" and offering to "repose" of Roger.

Leo Gorcey's Slip Mahoney character, in the Bowery Boys movies, was all about this trope.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: "Are you addressing I?" (Pike could have said "Am I being addressed by you?" - which, while correct, is even more pretentious.)

Exaggerated in Idiocracy, where the police would recite memorized legalese that is overly formal to make them sound more authoritative. For example, they incessantly refer to everyone as a "particular individual".

Chance the Gardener in Being There is a man with mild mental delays who can't take care of himself, but he's dressed so well everyone assumes he's rich, and thinks everything he says is a profound statement. Subverted in that Chance himself was just responding in the only way he knew how.

Tracy Flick: What happened at the speeches was an "unconscienceable'' tragedy.

My Fair Lady essentially starts with Professor Henry Higgins casually wagering that although his peers believe in this trope, he can overcome it and teach a commoner to blend in with the British upper class. With much of the movie essentially an elaborate socialite training montage for Eliza Doolittle, this trope happens multiple times before he can teach her to surpasses it.

Raymond Briggs' character James Bloggs. We first meet him in Gentleman Jim, where he has been a toilet attendant for many years, never moving up in the world because he "lacks enterprise and initiation" and "doesn't have the levels" ('O' and 'A' levels, school certificates or "cerstificates" as James puts it). We see him again in When the Wind Blows, where he and his wife, Hilda, prepare for nuclear war. "It could affect us all, the Ultimate Determent an' that." "I think it's called the Big Bang theory."

Mind you, Guido has an MBA, and has said that he spent considerable time perfecting his mook-speak, because (as with Chumley's Hulk Speak) he constantly deals with people who respect street smarts and a capacity for violence more than higher learning. The series as a whole has a similar preference, though... the one character who uses Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness is playing dumb.

It's also mentioned that Guido was in Guys and Dolls when he was in school, and developed a fondness for his character's speech patterns.

Ridcully, who has no patience for terminology, never lets nitpicking slow him down: thus the space-time continuinuinuum.

Twilight: Bella's narration throughout is simultaneously pretentious and idiotic.

Mrs Malaprop, as written by Sheridan.

Owl in Winnie-the-Pooh is rather like this; he's supposed to be what a young child would think sounds educated.

The book The Shadow God is full of Shlubb and Klumping on the part of its author, Aaron Rayburn. Specific examples include "the blue glow emancipating from the basement" (emanating) and "Spiers's eyes popped extraneously from their sockets" (??).

Christopher Paolini, author of Inheritance Cycle, has an unfortunate tendency to lapse into this, usually as a result of his Purple Prose, thesaurus abuse and trying too hard to come up with creative descriptions.

In Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Bridget tries to start off her interview with Colin Firth by asking him about a movie of his that isn't Pride and Prejudice, and comes up with: "Do you think the book of Fever Pitch has spored a confessional gender?" (She was supposed to ask him if it had "spawned a confessional genre," but had heard the phrase wrong.) He struggles to come up with a reasonable answer to this nonsensical question.

Informed example: the narrator of Anton Chekhov's short story "Peasants" characterizes the "hetman" of the village, saying that he is unable to read but had acquired "bookish expressions." The reader never hears much of his speech but is left to imagine that it would be much like this.

In Les Misérables, the villainous Thenardier is a frequent example of this. He speaks and writes in a flowery manner that gives him the air of a philosopher/intellectual, but his writing is filled with misspellings, and Hugo comments to the effect that his obsession with Big Words shows a stupid person's understanding of what a smart person sounds like. Thenardier also frequently defends arguments by fraudulent citations of famous people, but has no actual knowledge of those authorities, except that they are famous (e.g. he will cite to the novels of someone who only wrote poetry). His wife also demonstrates this through the odd names she gave to her daughters, taken from romantic novels. This choice is very similar to the idea underlying a Ghetto Name.

Occurs in Richard Lederer's Anguished English books. This example is from a court transcript:

Attorney: How did you know he was drunk? Witness: Because he was argumentary and he couldn't pronunciate his words.

The mother of the title character in Mark Twain's "A Dog's Tale" used fancy-sounding human words she didn't know the meaning of while speaking to other dogs in an attempt to seem important. When asked to explain what they meant, she would come up with a nonsensical explanation with more fancy-sounding words.

And every day the friends and neighbors flocked in to hear about my heroism — that was the name they called it by, and it means agriculture. I remember my mother pulling it on a kennel once, and explaining it in that way, but didn't say what agriculture was, except that it was synonymous with intramural incandescence.

Ravenor has the rogue trader Sholto Unwerth, whose mangling of the English language must be seen to be believed.

Sholto Unwerth: I miss nothing, eaves-wise. Ears as sharp as pencils, me. No, no. All fair. If Mistress Zeedmund here finds me an abject increment to her affiliations, and wants no more of me, all she has to overtake is a word in my general. A simple ingratitude from her, and I will be, so to speak, out of your air. Without any requisite for shoving, slapping, or harsh language. On the however hand, if what I have so far expleted trickles her fancy, I would be most oblate to dispel some more, at her total inconvenience, on the subject of what I have pertaining in my cargo hold.”

Augustus and Hazel from The Fault in Our Stars are borderline cases—they get some of their longer and/or rarer and/or archaic words right and then misuse "transmit" or "soliloquy", for just two examples.

Monday Begins on Saturday: The hack academician Amvrosiy Amvrosiy Vybegallo speaks in unintelligibly mangled French and tries to imitate sophisticated syntax to sound more intelligent and conceal his lack of intellect and manners. And impress a girl.

(Zigzagged) Shlubb and Klump French: Perceval and Karadoc from Kaamelott. While they occasionally play the trope straight, most of their word-based humor comes from them having no clue what some relatively complex words mean, and they don't attempt to use it. Then there's the "secret technique" that resulted in Memetic Mutation: "c'est pas faux" (translating to "that's not wrong" or "yeah, I guess"), which allows the user to mask his ignorance in a conversation.

One minor character inverts this, as he can't remember the "big words", and of course serves as messenger between Lancelot's rebels and Arthur. He memorably turned "The king sends an ultimatum" into "The king sends a nutritionist".

Arthur Daley, the Honest John of Minder, often uses larger words than he understands and is prone to malapropisms, as tries to present himself as genteel and upper crust.

The best known interpreter of Runyonesque dialogue was character actor and TV producer Sheldon Leonard. His distinctive version of the overly literate gangster/thug kept him employed in movies, radio and television for nearly sixty years. When not doing character parts, Leonard produced TV classics like The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show, and I Spy, often doing guest shots on his own shows.

The In Living Color! sketch character, Oswald Bates, is an inmate who delivers self-educated political ramblings. The humor is based on his misuse of vocabulary words, and anatomical terms in particular.

"First of all, we must internalize the flatulation of the matter, by transmitting the effervescent of the indonesian proximity, in order to further segregate the crux, of my venereal infection. Now, if I may retain my liquids here for one moment, I'd like to continue the redundance of my, quote-unquote, "intestinal tract", see, because to preclude on the issue of world domination would only circumvent... excuse me, circumsize the revelation that reflects the aphrodesiatic symptoms, which now perpetrates the gericurl's activation." "Allow me to expose my colon, once again, the ramification inflicted on the incision placed within the Fallopian cavities serves to be holistic, taken form the Latin word, 'jalapeno'..."

An episode of M*A*S*H has Radar taking a correspondence course in creative writing. The episode consists mainly of him writing the daily reports like a bad novel, in the process angering Colonel Potter.

Firefly: The scene from the bar in the "Train Job" episode? ("This is a most... Ass-picious day!")

In the Castle episode "Overkill" the hungover motel clerk tends to babble on in a fashion like this ("I appreciate you guys intervejecting [sic] with the police down there on my behest.")

The Detroit 187 episode "Beaten/ Cover Letter" featured a boxer's manager who spoke like this— and a detective who mocked him for it.

One of the running gags on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is Charlie's tendancy to slip into this mode whenever he tries to impress people. One of the most memorable happens when he receives advice on how to talk to a beautiful woman.

Mac: Just tell her you're a philanthropist. Chicks dig it when you work with kids and senior citizens and crap. Woman: So what do you do for a living? Charlie: I'm a ... full-on-rapist ... you know, kids and old people, mainly.

In one episode of Boy Meets World, Eric gets a word-a-day calendar to improve his vocabulary and he tries to use these words in conversation but repeatedly fails at it. By the end of the episode he gets the hang of it but annoys everybody by using big words in mundane conversation.

An episode of Friends had Joey writing a letter and discovering, to his delight, the thesaurus function on his word processor. Given the tool's imprecisions, his letter (and his dialogue for the rest of the episode) became this trope.

Chandler:[reading from letter] "Baby kangaroo Tribbiani"?

Michael Scott of The Office (US) is likely to use several of those every time he speaks.

And when he "improvs conversation" as he puts it, expect him to confuse everyone including himself, leading to a metaphorgotten.

Gob of Arrested Development has not mastered either the meaning or pronunciation of circumvent. He does not fare any better with consummate either.

Sabalom Glitz, Doctor Who's very own Honest John's Dealership who appears in the serials "Trial of a Time Lord" and "Dragonfire", tends to drift into this when attempting to convince others of his intelligence and sophistication.

Played for laughs a lot in Only Fools and Horses. Del Boy uses French words and phrases, and sometimes long English words, in an effort to sound sophisticated, knowledgeable and/or upper-class. He fails. Other characters also do this from time to time, principally Boycie.

Danielle: You're always mean to me, just like you were to Dad! You emasculated him. Well, you're not going to emasculate me! Bree: You don't even know what that means, you petulant sockpuppet! Danielle: Who. Cares. I'm going to the store. Bree:[as Danielle walks out] BUY A DICTIONARY!

In Trailer Park Boys, most of Ricky's Malapropers have no such delusions, but he will occasionally try to use fancy terms which inevitably fall into this trope.

Ricky: You're going to do us a little favour. Au Gratin.

Little Carmine Lupertazzi, in his constant efforts to demonstrate erudition he never had and couldn't begin to spell, fell prey to this on The Sopranos with monotonous regularity.

Monty Python's Flying Circus mines comedy by portraying Australian attempts to be erudite, indulging in the English stereotype that Australians are uncultured boors.

The "Bruces" sketch is about the philosophy department at the fictional University of Woolamaloo, where all the professors are ockers named Bruce who fixate on getting drunk.

"Australian Table Wines" is a high-class discussion of various Australian wines. One is said to "really open up the sluices at both ends" and another "should be used only for hand-to-hand combat."

Radio

The classic version of this trope is Amos And Andy in both radio and television shows of the 1940s and 1950s. The radio show had its black leads voiced by white actors (who also played the roles in blackface in a movie; the television show cast actual African-Americans) speaking fluent Shlubb and Klump. It fell out of favor when polite society discovered that many whites who watched the show thought that the "Negros" they met in real life were just as stupid and shiftless as these caricatures. Weirdly, even though Amos & Andy has been off the air for half a century, even as reruns, similar blackface characters keep turning up in home-grown musicals performed by all-white college fraternities.

This was a particular specialty of Archie the Bartender, in the old '40s comedy Duffys Tavern.

The Bob & Ray character of Dr. Elmer Stapley, "The Word Wizard", was all about this trope.

In the Stanley Baxter Playhouse episode "Two Desperate Men", based on "The Ransom of Red Chief" by O. Henry, this is part of the characterisation of Hughie, the kidnapper played by Baxter, for example calling Glasgow "That great sprawling metamorphosis". This gets lampshaded by the kidnap victim:

The theme of mooks talking over their heads was a mainstay of Damon Runyon's writings in the early 20th century and is the likely inspiration for most modern examples. Guys and Dolls, a musical and movie in the 1950s, is still being performed today, giving generations of American high school students a chance to channel their inner mook on stage.

Another '50s example is the musical and movie Kiss Me Kate, the plot of which concerns a production of a musical version of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Two mooks show up at the theater to make sure the leading man pays his gambling debts. They get to strut their stuff in the classic comic song, "Brush Up Your Shakespeare."

The mooks can almost steal the show the show this way if they can play their respective mob stereotypes (the stocky, verbose fellow with an exaggerated accent, and the skinny old guy with the Marlon-Brando-impersonator's voice) completely and hilariously straight, even while singing.

Macheath in Brecht'sThe Threepenny Opera is sort of a cross between this and Know-Nothing Know-It-All, speaking in a much more genteel manner than his mooks, but prone to crude language when angry. In one scene, he lectures them on their ignorance and discusses Chippendale vs. Louis Quatorze furniture but doesn't actually know which piece of furniture is which.

Shakespeare liked to write buffoonish, lower-class characters who try to speak above their station and end up littering their speech with malapropisms, much to the confusion of many modern students.

A classic element of Minstrel Shows was the "stump speech," where a stereotypical black character (usually a white actor in blackface) gives a political address filled with high-flown malapropisms from beginning to end.

G(a)linda and Madame Morrible of Wicked are both prone to this. Specifically, they tend to tack extraneous or just plain wrong suffixes onto otherwise serviceable words. Since they typically do it when speaking to people of lower class than themselves, it's possible they know it's wrong but think their audience will be impressed anyway.

Actually, according to the companion book The Grimmerie, this is simply Ozian English, dialectically speaking.

In the Danish comedy play Erasmus Montanus, the village Know-Nothing Know-It-All speaks Schlubb And Klump Latin, with a good dose of Canis Latinicus mixed in with occasionally correct words. The main character (a pompous and over-educated Stranger in a Familiar Land come home to visit his parents) tries to call him on it, only to fail because the villagers don't speak a word of the language anyway and finds the conman's gibberish more convincing.

In the Commedia dell'Arte, one of Dottore's standards was to misuse words, for example pluralizing things according to Latin or Greek rules; he was terrified of being mugged by "hoodla" (hoodlums).

Mrs. Malaprop in The Rivals was a famous example, and inspired the coining of the term "malapropism":

Mrs. Malaprop: Then, sir, she should have a supercilious knowledge in accounts; and as she grew up, I would have her instructed in geometry, that she might know something of the contagious countries; but above all, Sir Anthony, she should be mistress of orthodoxy, that she might not mis-spell, and mis-pronounce words so shamefully as girls usually do; and likewise that she might reprehend the true meaning of what she is saying.

Video Games

Perhaps the most egregious example of this is Yangus of Dragon Quest VIII, who while mostly being a lower-class Boisterous Bruiser, occasionally tries to mix in words of more than 2 syllables...and always, ALWAYS screws them up. How hard is it to say 'specific,' man?!

Yumihiko Ichiyanagi/Sebastian Debeste in Ace Attorney Investigations 2 misuses words and phrases on a daily basis. Initially, it just makes him look like a Know-Nothing Know-It-All, but ultimately you learn that no one's ever really tried to teach him anything, due to pressure from his father to just give him a good grade and be done with it.

Abercrombie Fizzwidget from Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando. It turns out that he does this because he's actually dim-witted Captain Qwark in disguise. The real Fizzwidget speaks normally.

"Who am I? Who am I? Lukan! Lukan the Witless! Where I go, the masses quabble in perturbisiveness and trepidunction!"

Lord Rugdumph gro-Shurgak in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. He manages to work about three malapropisms into every sentence. He wishes you to exterminize some ogres, who have abjected his daughter. Should you do so, he will grant you a sword that has been passed in his family for many generators.

This sword has the effects of temporarily decreasing the victim's Speechcraft skill and applying a Silence effect, by the way.

Qui the Promoter from Jade Empire, an NPC at the Imperial Arena who tries to impress others by (ab)using big words. At one point, if you complain about this, he retorts with "Everything I say is perfectly cromulent, and it might do you well to embiggen your vocabulary before you fling accretions in my discretion."

Barnum from Fable II, who learned his "ridiculousitous" vocabulary from a dodgy thesaurus he purchased.

From a merchant in the beginning of the game who speaks in much the same manner.

In Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, one of the Cipher Mooks regularly spouts nonsense statistics. This often works on his companion, though he's left with a vague suspicion that he's being tricked.

The K'tang of Star Control 3 use words like Crushify and Destructimate rather often. They also react very badly if you point this out. Of course, they react badly no matter what you do. They really really like to crushify.

The manual for Bulletstorm describes the planet the game takes place on as "once-beatific." Beatific can literally mean "bestowing bliss" or "blissful", which is what they were likely shooting for... but it carries very strong connotations that this bliss is sacred or holy in nature, which makes the line all kinds of awkward. Considering the game's tone, this may have been intentional.

Donny, the sign-in guy from You Don't Know Jack 2011, especially when you ask him to explain the rules. Which means that any question written by him in the game proper is going to be... tricky.

In Housepets!, Falstaff the raccoon believes that stealing is in his genies, hence his scientific non-enclosure of procon looter.

Web Animation

A rather painful example happened in the Cracked animated short "America Was Saved by A French Millenial," referring to Marquis de Lafayette, who helped George Washington during the Revolutionary War at 19 years old. A millenial is a person born in the mid 1980's to late 90's who became an adult after the turn of the millennium. It's the name of a generation, not some current slang for "young adult" and it would not remotely apply to someone born in 1757.

The Binder of Shame features Biff Bam, a guy with "a habit of randomly mispronouncing things in ways that made little or no sense at all". The resulting Funetik Aksent has the mispronunciations capitalised so they're not mistaken for typos.

"I looked over your character sheets and everything is okay except for one thing. I asked everyone to make ACAMADEMIANS and one of you made a NIMJA."

Torq, the 3/4ths Orc from the Critical Hit Podcast often tries too hard when he tries to repeat things the smarter characters say.

Bugs Bunny occasionally indulges in this "stragedy", particularly when confronted with a "huge Frankincense monster" that means to render him "non compus mentus".

As does Daffy Duck, when contemplating "self-preservatiomunum...munum".

THAT, sir, is an inmitigated frabrication!

Peter Griffin finds the use of this trope "both shallow and pedantic".

This holds for any word used that Peter doesn't understand, such as "esoteric".

Peter: * after being told his theme choice was esoteric* Lois, Who's the Boss? is not a food. Brian: Swing and a miss.

Or...

Rehab Director: You know this degenerate? Peter: A degenerate, am I? Well you're a fastizio! (Beat) See? I can make up words too.

Also when he thought being chosen for jury duty made him part of the elite.

Peter: I have been selected. Brian: For what? Peter: Oh, nothing too important, just jury duty! They have summoned me. I am part of an elite group of individuals deemed intelligent enough to decide the fate of a fellow citizen. [Meg laughs]Peter: Ah, the amused laughter of the envious.

Coach Wittenberg from Hey Arnold! is made of this trope, occasionally leading to Getting Crap Past the Radar in the process (such as the time he refers to synchronized swimming as "circumcised swimming").

Although Early Cuyler from Squidbillies is not trying to sound intelligent, he mispronuncitates and adds sylabbizanation to almost every word over three syllables because he is a hillbilly stereoishtypery.

Early: I have re-evalutated the saturation and I have convoluted that you ain't wild, you mild.

Blob from The Dreamstone has bouts of this, particularly when trying to sound authoritative.

Chicken from Cow and Chicken uses large words at times (largely incorrectly) to sound smarter than he really is. Thing of it is... it actually works, but only because the people with whom he lives and interacts are completemorons.

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